Word: armenians
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...Soviet aircraft, running low on fuel, was asking for clearance to land at Zvartnots airport in Yerevan. I heard someone calling out numbers over the radio in Russian, but his Armenian accent made them difficult to understand. The Soviet pilot was obviously having trouble comprehending the response too, and asked ground control several times to repeat the coordinates...
Then I encountered George, a homespun Armenian philosopher in a green nylon jacket decorated with a red-white-and-blue American sticker showing clasped hands. He told me of a relative in Leninakan who lost two children in the rubble; a third child had her legs severed at the knees. He reflected on Armenian hopes to regain Nagorno-Karabakh, the disputed Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, and told how his six-year-old son can already sing patriotic songs about his Armenian homeland. "We already have had our share of grief this year," George said. "And now this new disaster promises...
...earthquake was the latest catastrophe for the Armenians, an ancient people who through the ages have been massacred, conquered and divided. Their home is a region of mountain ranges and fertile valleys, roughly the size of Maryland, lying in what the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov called the "high Caucasian maze." Of the republic's 3.5 million people, 90% are Armenian...
...quake's epicenter was 25 miles northeast of Leninakan, the republic's second largest city. Rumbling through a fault only twelve miles below the surface, the quake toppled all buildings higher than two stories within a radius of 30 miles, an area with a population of about 700,000. Armenian towns and cities such as Kirovakan, Stepanavan, and Leninakan were largely destroyed. Even Yerevan, 65 miles from the epicenter, suffered damage. The earthquake came in a minute-long tremor, followed four minutes later by a sharp aftershock, measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale. The timing could not have been worse...
Among the victims of the earthquake, it is believed, were some of the more than 100,000 Armenian refugees who in the past three weeks fled across the border from neighboring Azerbaijan. For ten months the two republics have been locked in a bloody dispute over Armenia's territorial claim to Nagorno- Karabakh, a predominantly Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. The turmoil has revived the historic blood feud between Armenians, who are largely Christian, and Azerbaijanis, who are mainly Muslim. Violence between the two sides has claimed at least 60 lives and forced Gorbachev to send thousands of troops into...